Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  Blunt told his interrogators how he had been almost caught by a policeman who demanded to see inside his case while he was on the way to a meeting with ‘Henry’. The police were making a search in connection with some criminal matter, but, by giving a certain telephone number, Blunt managed to convince the constable that he worked for MI5. It had been a frightening experience, for he would have had difficulty, if reported to his employers, in explaining away some of the documents as ‘homework’.

  The Russians became so concerned about the enormous amount of documentary material that Blunt and Burgess were providing, particularly after the close brush with the police, that ‘Henry’ provided them with special cameras so that they could photograph the documents in miniature and hand over only the cassettes. They did this for a while at the Courtauld Institute until they found themselves so short of sleep that they rebelled and told the Russians that they were reverting to the old system.

  Blunt could remember only one other occasion when Burgess had refused to obey Soviet orders. Though his Russian masters knew that Burgess was a homosexual, they were keen for him to marry a young woman who had high-level social-political connections, but so peculiar were her sexual requirements that even Burgess found them ‘too wildly extravagant’. To Burgess’s amusement, the lady eventually became the wife of an eminent politician.

  Burgess’s notable work for MI5 against the Germans explains why he was never suspected as a spy, any more than Blunt was, until he defected. It also accounts for his close social connection with the then deputy director of MI5, Guy Liddell, and the freedom of their conversational exchanges. This has been held against Liddell by people who did not know that Burgess was an MI5 agent.

  Referring to Liddell, Blunt recalled how he would occasionally remark to him, when dealing with an interesting document in the office, ‘What a pity we can’t give this to the Russians.’ Then he would laugh inwardly because that was exactly what he would shortly be doing. When asked if he had ever experienced any pangs of conscience about being a traitor to his own country, all Blunt would admit was that he and Burgess ‘felt better about things’ once the Russians were in the war.

  As with Klaus Fuchs, the atomic spy who thought it was unforgiveable that the Russians were not being told British–American atomic secrets, Blunt considered it irrelevant that the Russians declined to tell their allies anything at all. Alexander Foote, the Briton who did so much valuable espionage work for Russia as a member of the Swiss Lucy Ring and later defected back to Britain in 1947 when he found his Soviet masters to be ungrateful, told MI5 that, on strict orders from the Moscow Centre, any information of no value to Russia was to be destroyed and on no account should be passed to any other ally.

  This attitude was particularly heinous in view of what is almost certainly the truth about the Lucy Ring, though it has never been officially revealed. The Lucy Ring consisted of three main agents, which is why the Swiss knew it as ‘Rote Drei’ (Red Three). Foote was the radio operator; Alexander Rado, a Hungarian, was the nominal chief; and the main informant was Rudolf Roessler, a Bavarian exiled to Switzerland because of his anti-Nazi stance. Roessler’s codename was ‘Lucy’, and, because his contribution was of such outstanding importance in the Red Army’s defeat of Germany, the ring has been called after him. Roessler provided continuing details of the German battle order, troop movements and tactical plans from before the Nazi attack on Russia in June 1941 until November 1943.

  Roessler never revealed his source, though Foote, Rado and others since were led to believe that it came from about ten dissident German officers in the high command structure. But it is inconceivable that such a group would have been prepared to see their own forces destroyed and their country invaded and demolished by Russia, however much they hated Hitler. Even more unlikely is the possibility that, in securing and transmitting such a mass of information to Roessler over more than two years, they would not have been detected and caught. There is only one credible source of the information: the British code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, which, through the counter-intelligence operation codenamed ‘Ultra’, was in continuous receipt of Germany’s war plans and intentions. Recently, I have secured confirmation of this from secret intelligence sources.

  It was in Britain’s interests to help the Russians to defeat the German onslaught, but at the same time it was essential that the fact that Bletchley was breaking the German codes produced by an ‘unbreakable’ cypher machine should never leak. An official channel was established whereby some of this information was relayed to Moscow after it had been doctored to look as though it had been obtained from spies and other more conventional means. With the war on the Russian front being waged on such a scale, so much information needed to be passed on almost daily that this could not be done without arousing Soviet suspicions of a massive code break, and there was the further problem that the Russians tended to disbelieve it, especially after one batch proved to be incorrect. With insight, it was argued that the Russians would be much more likely to accept the information and act on it if it came from their own trusted sources. My information is that most of it was therefore relayed to Roessler through intermediaries, probably located in the British diplomatic offices in Switzerland, and he gave the impression that he was receiving it directly from German sources, which were, in fact, mythical. The Russians may well have seen through the subterfuge because of the information being given to them surreptitiously from Bletchley by John Cairncross and possibly by other Soviet spies there, as I shall describe in Chapter 16.

  Under pressure from Germany, the Swiss were driven to break up the Lucy Ring in November 1943, but by that time the German defeat in Russia was assured. Roessler, who died in 1962, continued to refuse to reveal his sources, and when Foote was questioned by British intelligence in 1947 he told the story of the nest of German traitors in the high command, which he still believed.

  It has been suggested that Foote was really a British agent working for the Russians as a double, but I can find no evidence for this. Throughout the war, he failed to pass any intelligence to Britain, including the fact that Ursula Beurton had been transferred to Oxford in 1940.

  The fate of Alexander Rado, head of the Lucy Ring, illustrates very dramatically the totally selfish attitude of the Russians. He was later censured, among other ‘crimes’, for passing to Britain information about Hitler’s V2 rockets, which were being developed to destroy London. This information, which Rado had somehow obtained from the rocket station at Peenemünde, was of no value to Russia because of the short range of the V2, but the Kremlin disapproved of giving Britain any assistance that would help to lessen the bombardment of London.

  After the Lucy Ring was shut down by the Swiss authorities, Rado found his way to Paris and approached the Russian embassy there for further work. He was flown to Cairo en route for Moscow, and, fearing that he would be blamed for the closure of the ring rather than praised for its previous successes, he toyed with the idea of defecting to Britain. A British security officer in Cairo, Maurice Oldfield, later to become a most able head of the secret service, talked with him and telegraphed secret service headquarters in London to seek guidance. Once again, through the luck that seemed to favour the KGB, the telegram was handled by Philby, who, after taking instruction from his Soviet controller, instructed Oldfield to ensure that Rado went on to Moscow. There he was awarded ten years’ imprisonment for his magnificent efforts, after a secret ‘trial’.

  After serving his sentence, he moved to Budapest, where he became chairman of the Hungarian Geographical Society, cartography, in which he was genuinely expert, having been his cover in Switzerland. He wrote his memoirs but judiciously omitted mention of his experiences in the Soviet labour camp.

  Blunt, Fuchs and others like them were totally unmoved by the sacrifices made by British sailors and seamen in convoying war material to Russia, with great loss of ships and life. There is reason to believe that Blunt knew of the circumstances surroun
ding the loss of HMS Edinburgh, a cruiser that had been crippled while on convoy duty in Russia. On the eve of May Day 1942, two powerful Russian destroyers, which had been part of the escort sent out from the Kola Inlet, returned to harbour pleading fuel shortage. Instead of returning, they remained in harbour over the May Day celebrations, during which time German destroyers found the Edinburgh and torpedoed her. I am told that Blunt was not prepared to be moved by any such events if they implied criticism of his beloved Russia.

  Blunt had left MI5 before it received the details of the wartime KGB radio messages that American cypher experts were later able to decode. One of them, from the Centre in Moscow, had been addressed to the Polish communist underground movement, warning its members to lie low, as the Red Army had been instructed to halt its offensive on Warsaw to give the retreating Germans time to clean up the Jews and other undesirable Poles there. It is considered unlikely by those who interrogated Blunt that this message would have disconcerted him.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE ‘KLATT’ AFFAIR

  AMONG THE MASS of information that Blunt gave to the Russians during the latter part of the war were details of the ultra-secret plans for ‘Fortitude’, the codename for the operation to deceive the Germans into believing that the main Allied invasion would be in the Pas-de-Calais area, not in Normandy. This could have been extremely dangerous and could have cost thousands of lives, for at that stage in 1944 the Russians did not want the war to end quickly. Having the Germans on the run, they wanted to occupy as much of Europe as possible so that they could communise it. For some reason, the Russians chose not to inform the Germans of the British–American deception plans, or, if they did, they were not believed.

  Blunt managed to fool all his colleagues in MI5 by his imperturbable manner when seemingly in difficulties, and I have discovered only one self-incriminating remark prior to his confession. Col. T. A. Robertson recalled that when Blunt left the service in 1945 he said to him, ‘Well, it’s given me great pleasure to pass on the names of every MI5 officer to the Russians.’ Robertson, who says that he knew that Blunt was a communist and made no secret of it, passed on the information to those who should have taken note of it, but nothing was entered in Blunt’s file.

  It may well be asked why, when Blunt was in such a valuable position, the KGB permitted him to leave MI5 and return to the art history world where his value would be minimal. The KGB does not let its agents off the hook out of gratitude, and it could easily have blackmailed Blunt into remaining in MI5 where there was a permanent position open to him with inevitable promotion. It is possible that the Russians thought that there might be some value in having an agent closely connected with the royal household, for Blunt also became surveyor of the King’s pictures for George VI on leaving MI5. But Blunt told his interrogators that he inclined to their opinion that the Russians felt he could be spared from MI5 because they had an alternative agent in place there.

  Before I end my survey of Blunt’s activities inside MI5, there is one incident, to which he confessed, that is worthy of record because it demonstrates the incredible lengths to which the Russians will go with deception and false information to achieve a long-term objective, whatever the cost in human life and suffering. Blunt confessed that soon after Russia was attacked in 1941, while he was dealing with signals intelligence in MI5, he betrayed a highly secret interception operation known by the codename ‘Klatt’ (because a Jewish intelligence agent called Klatt was believed to be involved in it).

  The British radio-interception organisation (now known as GCHQ, Government Communications Headquarters) had detected a regular stream of radio messages emanating from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, which had allied itself with Nazi Germany, and had managed to decipher them. It turned out to be information about Russia’s forces and strategic plans for their use, which was being sent from Sofia, where Klatt was based, to the headquarters of the German secret service, the Abwehr, in Berlin. Furthermore, the British were able to pinpoint the Russian source of this information – a secret transmitter operating near Kuibyshev, on the Volga, where the KGB Intelligence Centre had been evacuated when the fall of Moscow seemed imminent.

  As the ‘Klatt’ traffic continued to reach the Abwehr daily, the British could not understand why the KGB was failing to track down the transmitter and silence it. It transpired that an attempt by the Red Army General Timoshenko to retake the key town of Kharkov in May 1942 had been defeated by the Germans using ‘Klatt’ information. The battle had cost the Russians 100,000 men and hundreds of tanks and guns.

  As the ‘Klatt’ traffic continued, MI5 reluctantly decided that it must be part of some gigantic double-cross system that the Russians were using deliberately, staggering though the resulting losses had been. This view was still held when ‘Klatt’ information led to the destruction by the Germans of a Russian convoy in the Black Sea. The only explanation MI5 could find was that ‘Klatt’ was a double agent, ostensibly working for the German Abwehr but really operating in the interests of the Russians, who were providing what is known in the disinformation game as ‘chicken feed’ for a greater purpose.

  The riddle seems to have been solved near the end of the war by the Allied capture of a White Russian called General Turkhul, who had been a pre-war agent of the British secret service in Paris. He admitted that, after France fell in 1940, he had disappeared and worked for the Germans, becoming the head of a radio-intelligence system with a branch in Sofia responsible for the ‘Klatt’ traffic. The Germans believed that Turkhul, who had been a friend of Himmler before the war – hence his use by the British then – had Russian contacts through whom he was securing his marvellous information about Soviet battle dispositions and intentions. Turkhul told his Allied interrogators that indeed he had such contacts but only because he was, and always had been, primarily a Soviet agent. The Russians had deliberately been feeding him with information for onward transmission to Berlin. The Oriental reasoning behind this, Turkhul explained, centred on an army, said to total about a million troops, that had been recruited by another Russian general, Andrei Vlassov, who genuinely loathed the Stalin regime and was determined to help the Germans overthrow it.

  Vlassov, one of the younger Red Army generals, had been captured by the Germans when the Soviet Shock Army, which he commanded, was defeated in its defence of Moscow. He volunteered to raise a Russian Army of Liberation from Red Army deserters and prisoners of war and, after some resistance from the Nazi leadership, was permitted to do so, operating from a base near Berlin. Until Hitler objected personally, there was a plan to set up a Russian government in exile, with Vlassov as a kind of de Gaulle.

  His propaganda squads, operating near the front line, secured thousands of deserters, and the Germans equipped and trained the Army of Liberation for eventual use on the Russian front. Because of this army’s size and success in securing deserters, Turkhul said that Stalin greatly feared the effect it might have if it appeared flying what would look like freedom’s flag. Stalin was therefore pathologically determined to do anything, at any cost, to prevent its use and had instructed the KGB accordingly.

  As the prime part of the deception, Turkhul had to convince Himmler and the German high command that Vlassov and his troops would suddenly change sides and fight with the Russians if ever they were taken to the Eastern front. He claimed to have information that Vlassov had been secretly in touch with the Kremlin to this effect.

  The wonderfully accurate information that Turkhul continued to send to the Abwehr had been calculated to strengthen his credibility with Himmler and, through him, with Hitler. As Turkhul explained it, the deception, costly though it had been, had paid rich dividends. The Vlassov Army was certainly never used on the Russian front proper, a portion of it, only, being deployed in the last-ditch fighting in Austria.

  Previously, following false information sent over ‘Klatt’ after the Russian defeat at Kharkov, the Germans were led to believe that the Red Army was finished, and they pushed on to
Stalingrad, which, Hitler insisted, had to be taken. To capture the city, all the Germans had were two Rumanian armies, one Italian, one Hungarian and their own Sixth Army. The Russians knew this from their own radio-intelligence network operating in Switzerland, the Lucy Ring. To combat the overstretched Nazi forces, the Russian high command had mustered thirteen Soviet armies.

  In November, the Russians attacked at the junction of the German Army and the Rumanians. The Rumanians were crushed, the Italians and Hungarians fled the field and the German Sixth Army was encircled and destroyed. At that moment, the Vlassov Army might conceivably have tipped the scale for the Germans, Turkhul believed. It is certain that Hitler forbade its use on the Russian front, and, while this may have been partly due to his racial prejudices, the disinformation he had received concerning its loyalty might well have been a potent factor.

  Vlassov was eventually captured by the Russians and, along with the other Red Army generals who had joined him and were handed over to Stalin under the Yalta Agreement, was executed.

  Blunt eventually provided independent proof that ‘Klatt’ had been a double-cross. He admitted that he had handed the deciphered ‘Klatt’ traffic to ‘Henry’ for a few weeks but had then been told not to bother with it anymore because Moscow knew all about it. From that date, Blunt himself had assumed that the operation was a Soviet double-cross because the ‘Klatt’ traffic out of Sofia to Berlin continued until the battle for Stalingrad.

  Such sacrificial ‘chicken feed’ for the long-term objective is not unprecedented in Soviet intelligence. I have evidence of an occasion when the KGB permitted the Germans to sink a heavily laden Russian troopship to establish the credibility of one valuable agent who had given them the necessary information.